The making of me

My sweet fourth baby broke me and remade me into something new.

Sometimes it feels like I peaked as a mother of young children at three kids. I had myself the most together around that time in my life: the perfectly packed bag, juggling night shifts, nannies, pumpkin patches, and summer breaks like an absolute boss.

That season of mothering holds such a special place in my heart and in my soul. I was doing it alongside one of my favorite moms and favorite people, surrounded by a community of sweet chosen family. My kids were tablet-free, my bag held modeling clay and coloring crayons, and dollar theater snacks were safely hidden inside.

I don't know if my children will remember those years with the same fondness that I do. The morning movies, afternoons at the pool, and early evening cuddles with friends exhausted from sun and chlorine. But those memories live on in my mind and in family photos: little boys in Star Wars costumes or superhero capes, with a toddling princess chasing behind them.

There were afternoon Nerf battles and water gun fights. Iced coffee consumed amidst piles of laundry while communing with friends and planning easy summer dinners. It was magic in the purest sense of the word.

My fourth pregnancy came along four years after my third. A much larger gap than any of the others, and completely unexpected.

She was completion. She was desperately desired by me.

But she also broke some things that maybe were brittle to begin with.

It was a pregnancy marked by loneliness, isolation, and complete vulnerability. When I feel unsupported, I tend to retreat into a mindset best described as, "Fine. I'll do it myself." It is protective in its own way. Abandonment is something I find incredibly difficult to carry. I own that I shut out everything that felt to painful to manage because I could not figure out a way to make myself ok with doing it alone.

So I settled deep into myself, as though the only way to pay for the gift of a fourth baby was to earn her through loneliness and endless vomiting.

I cannot adequately express how much I puked.

I could barely make it through morning report and handover before my cold, dry trader joes pop-tarts were redeposited into the toilet. In the few photos I have from that time, I look flat and hollow, green around the edges and utterly exhausted.

The week before I was due to deliver, I realized I hadn't really processed enough to be ready for the act of birth itself. In a last-minute attempt to catch my mind up with my body, I audited a birth course at work.

Even then, when my OB sat across from me and said, "Today we call it. Today you look awful,  your labs and blood pressure are not improving," all I could do was sigh and nod in agreement.

I was well and truly done.

So along she came in what felt like the longest solitary labor for a fourth baby. Everyone assumes the fourth one will just rush right out. This one took her time.

I labored the way I gestated: alone, inside my own mental fortress.

And then came the fourth baby.

The baby I spent the most time with, thanks to six beautiful months of maternity leave through Baby & Co. I soaked up every drop of baby goodness. I smelled her head and her toes. I memorized her.

In so many ways, I gave more of myself to mothering her. I wasn't chasing a toddler. I wasn't in my twenties trying to figure out how to care for a newborn. And I was keenly aware of how fast and fleeting the baby stage is because I was simultaneously parenting children who were already nine, seven, and five.

Organizationally, however, this baby was simply along for the ride.

The ride of school runs, sports practices, and being the baby of a mother working at a start-up that offered both incredible flexibility and enormous demands on my emotional and mental space.

There were no perfectly packed diaper bags.

Sometimes there weren't even packed diapers.

To be the youngest of four children is to spend your life chasing the ones ahead of you.

I have grieved the missed phases of babyhood and the rushed maturity that comes with being the youngest. Watching movies above your age range because I cannot fully segregate you from your siblings, and they are absolutely going to watch Jurassic Park whether you are ready for it or not.

You will never experience holding a brand-new sibling or meeting a new baby brought home from the hospital.

But you have something different.

You have a team of memory keepers.

People who knew you from that very first hospital visit and remember every moment since. People who can tell stories about you before you can remember them yourself.

As for me, I am not a perfect mother.

But I am a more peaceful one than I used to be.

I know now to give every phase time because none of them last forever. So you still sleep in my bed at eight years old. And last autumn, we made our way to a pumpkin patch because I wanted to see the joy on your face as you explored it.

When you hold a grudge and tell me you hate me, I pause. I remind myself that I am your safe place to feel all of your feelings.

I am remaking myself too.

Learning that I deserve support and do not always have to be the one providing it.

Learning that sometimes it is okay to be alone.

Learning that I am not responsible for another person's unhappiness.

Learning that even if I am not liked, or loved, in every arena of my life, it does not mean I am not likable.

Or lovable.

Perhaps that is another gift my fourth baby gave me.

Not only the gift of knowing and loving her, but also the chance to know and love myself. Just as I am, and all the iterations of myself that I have been and continue to become. 

Burnout

I am in the midst of processing. Not the things I intended to work on, but instead an entire catalogue of events I didn't expect would surface when I started this journey.

I have been a nurse since I was 19 years old. If you don't feel like doing the maths, that makes 24 years.

I started thinking about medicine as a profession when I was 14. Initially, it wasn't because I dreamed of healthcare. It was because I wanted to work with abandoned children in Romania. Eventually, I had the opportunity to do exactly that. From there, I moved into postpartum care, caring for newborns and new mothers. That led me into labour and delivery, and years of sacred work in sacred spaces.

I hold two truths to be self evident.

The first is that nursing is a compassionate and beautiful calling. We are invited into some of the most intimate moments of a person's life. Often, we enter as complete strangers. If it is done well, and done right, it can be incredibly rewarding.

The second truth is that nursing is taxing, exhausting, and physically demanding. It is a profession I actively discourage my own children from pursuing. Not because it lacks meaning, but because it is underpaid and because compassion and calling are so often exploited.

There is a persistent implication that because nursing is a calling, you should allow yourself to be emotionally, physically, and mentally drained. That you should tolerate treatment that would be unacceptable in almost any other profession because somehow your commitment to caring should make you endlessly available.

It can be a calling AND I should also be treated professionally and compensated appropriately for the work I do.

This is not the first time in my 24 years that I have felt burned out and completely depleted. It is, however, the worst.

Part of that comes from managerial gaslighting, harassment, and the slow erosion of confidence that happens when concerns are dismissed often enough. The other part comes from the unseen toll of working in a clinic that is chronically understaffed, under-resourced, underpaid, and unsupported.

When I went through nursing school back in 2001, very little was said about mental health for healthcare professionals.

I received some minimal advice about what to do if a patient touched me inappropriately, because this was to be expected and anticipated, and unfortunately more than once I have had to deal with it. However, nobody told me what to do after a patient punched me in the face during a stroke crisis in my first six months as a nurse.

I was taught techniques to avoid being pinned down. Nobody explained what to do when I was unexpectedly grabbed from behind and held against a wall.

None of these events were treated as assaults.

Instead, I was taught the art of compartmentalisation.

Take what happened during your shift, leave it at the hospital door, and move on.

As though experiences somehow stay neatly contained within the walls where they occurred.

I still remember my drive home after losing my first baby during a delivery. I remember the conversation with my mentor on that drive. I remember arriving home feeling utterly broken.

And somehow I learned to shut it all down before walking through the front door.

I would go to bed and then return to work the next day.

I became very good at it.

My first apartment became my sanctuary. I lived alone and protected that space fiercely. Few people were ever invited inside. It was where I recovered, processed, and gathered myself before doing it all again.

Then life evolved.

A husband came along. Children followed. The quiet spaces disappeared.

The opportunities to process difficult things became fewer and farther between.

Over the years, I learned new skills. I learned how to hold space without giving all of my own away. I learned how to support bereaved families without carrying every emotion in the room home with me.

What I never mastered was coming home after thirteen hours of giving everything I had and still having enough left for the people waiting there.

Because nobody rescues you from the next two or three hours.

The moment you walk through the door, your family needs you too.

Children are like eager little adorable leeches. They have waited all day to soak you up the second you arrive home.

One of the great lies of parenthood is being told that the baby years are the hardest.

The teenage years are not for the faint of heart, they are beautiful and life changing, but incredibly draining.

The problem is sometimes the compartments get full, and if you never make the time to unlock the doors and work through it, it just sort of live in you and builds up. 

Two months ago, I started having panic attacks.

If I am being honest, I was probably having smaller ones last year and simply didn't recognise them for what they were.

I found myself unable to walk from the bus stop into the hospital without disappearing into a playlist and a pair of headphones. I needed something to disconnect from reality until the exact second I had to step into the clinic and begin my shift.

In a classic cliché, my first full-scale panic attack felt like a heart attack at the end of my shift. In true nurse fashion, I went home first, tried a hot shower and some Tylenol, when that didn't help I spent the night in the Emergency Department because I genuinely wasn't sure what else it could be.

I had seriously underestimated the chest pain component of panic. 

It is an experience.

So now I am taking some time to process and untangle things.

Time to work out what comes next.

Part of that work has been recognising something uncomfortable: no amount of personal growth, therapy, resilience, mindfulness, coping strategies, or self-reflection can compensate for a system that is fundamentally broken.

At some point, the problem stops being your ability to cope.

The problem becomes the environment itself.

Returning to a system that will not change, that continues to use people up and spit them out before moving on to the next new nurse, feels less and less like resilience and more and more like self-abandonment.

I don't know what comes next yet. I only know that after spending two decades teaching women to listen to their bodies, trust their instincts, and honour their limits, it might finally be time to take my own advice.